Main Street Wire
10/20/2007Contents
Trouble Finding Parking? On a Small Crusade, Islander Says Too Many Get Illegitimate Free Ride
by Jami Bernard
Main Street Wire
If you think it's tough to get a parking space on Main Street, you are correct. A photographic survey by a RIRA Common Council member reveals that of the 55 designated parking spaces in Northtown, stretching from PS/IS 217 to Rivercross, only 5 to 10 are available on any given day for short-term metered parking. The study found that the remaining 45-50 parking spots, or 87 percent, are occupied - the majority of them without proper permits - by vehicles that sit there for hours, days, even months.
And, the report says, those cars are not ticketed.
These statistics are the conclusion of a six-week investigation by Common Council member Frank Farance, who has been a thorn in the side of RIOC ever since he started decorating the kiosks of Main Street with posters that ridicule Deputy Director of Public Safety Rene Bryan for parking his personal SUV in a spot reserved for official Public Safety golf carts.
"Who is this man and why is he hogging the parking spaces on Main Street?" asked the poster. "His name is Rene Bryan and he parks a monster SUV on Main Street because... he can!"
Since then, Farance - who keeps his own car at Motorgate - has been on a tear against parking infractions. He has taken approximately 3,000 photographs in the course of documenting the worst offenders. The photos include close-ups of tires to show how the position of tire air valves and the tires' position in relation to the curb didn't change from day to day and week to week. After sorting and tabulating the results, Farance says he found that, on average, 30 parked cars bear the wrong permits. Another 24 vehicles have handicap permits, but, of those, some have the tags that hang from rear-view mirrors and are valid only for handicap spaces in parking lots, not for regular long-term street parking.
The need for parking is so great, says Farance, that even legitimate handicap-permit cars sometimes park in the wrong places - such as the two he saw in the M&D Deli commercial loading zone. In turn, they forced delivery trucks to pull into the bus stop, which then caused the Red Bus to block traffic both ways during a recent rush hour.
"No wonder there's no parking when up to 87 percent of the spaces are taken up by long-term or illegitimate parkers," says Farance, a software engineer.
Here's the way Farance sees it, based on his photographic evidence and a journal he kept:
Let's say you manage to find a spot, pay the required muni-meter fee, exhibit the muni-ticket in your windshield - but then you take longer than your allotted time (in some places, 40 minutes) to unload the kids and the Costco groceries and put the half-melted ice cream in the freezer. A Public Safety officer will be happy to write you a ticket and tuck it thoughtfully beneath your windshield wiper. At a time like that, you'd probably wish you were the owner of the blue GMC van that has been parked across from Motorgate for months, sporting a registration that expired three years ago. The van is safe because Public Safety apparently does not ticket it.
- If you can't find a spot and you unload your groceries in a no-standing zone, Public Safety has the right to shoo you away. But if you're the owner of the silver van that has been parked in front of PS/IS 217 for at least a month, with an expired inspection ticket, then you can stay there for as long as you like.
- Let's say you snag a parking space but you're too weary to traipse back to Motorgate, so you leave your car there overnight, hoping no one will notice. You will likely be ticketed by a keen-eyed Public Safety officer - maybe even towed. But the owner of the pickup truck with the fishing pole in the front seat that has been parked in front of Motorgate for months doesn't have to worry. On the dashboard is a police placard from the 115th precinct - not the 114th, which covers Roosevelt Island. Although it's always nice to know there's a cop around, that placard only entitles this car to use the 115th precinct parking lot, unless the car is being used on official police business - which does not usually take months or require a fishing pole.
- How about the car over by Rivercross that sports a shoulder patch from the Yonkers police department in its windshield? This car hasn't been moved in days, not even during street-cleaning hours, according to Farance. Yet it never seems to get ticketed.
While this article was being prepared, and perhaps as a result of Farance's barrage of e-mails to RIOC, some changes have already taken place. One of the cars reported on here has been moved, and another has updated its expired inspection.
Farance began his one-man campaign six weeks ago because "I had a hunch that parking was difficult, but until I actually measured it, I never imagined how scarce it is, or how poor a job Public Safety does on enforcement. After my first weekend's survey, I couldn't believe this was true, but day after day, week after week, I discovered how extensive this problem is."
He says that he has been harassed, even threatened, while taking photos, and that when he inquires about the double standard, owners of the unticketed cars tend to get angry, and Public Safety officers do not seem willing or able to explain the enforcement policy - or even to confirm whether there is one. An employee of Manhattan Park told Farance that her car needs to be parked 24 hours a day in front of 40 River Road (right outside Motorgate, instead of inside it) in case there's an emergency at 4 River Road - which is 250 feet away.
The worst incident so far, says Farance, was the time three Public Safety officers witnessed him being threatened by a man the officers appeared to know. The man didn't want his windshield photographed and threatened physical retaliation. "The officers wouldn't intervene," says Farance. "One of them actually said, 'That's what you get' for being a whistleblower."
It's true that Farance is not popular at Public Safety headquarters these days. Officers have been tearing down his Rene Bryan posters - despite a formal objection from RIRA [see sidebar] and a prohibition by RIOC President Steve Shane. At press time, Bryan had not responded to questions from The WIRE, though Bryan had earlier told its editor that his vehicle is kept handy for patrol purposes. Shane, who was traveling, responded in four e-mailed words: "PS enforces DOT regs."
"It's clearly a violation of the First Amendment," says Farance about the removal of his posters. "They [RIOC] are the government and they are quashing speech that is critical of the government."
The double-standard parking rules go deeper than simply tying up precious resources. When officers don't enforce the law, Farance maintains, scofflaws become emboldened and citizens become too intimidated to speak up. In every community, there are parking-space "perks," but there just aren't enough spaces on Roosevelt Island to be giving any away to the privileged.
Last year, Southtown building managers worked together to prevent one resident from parking his car each night in the 20-minute unloading driveway. The man had doctor's license plates but, since the majority of Southtown's apartments are filled with medical personnel anyway, there are only so many doctors who could possibly be on emergency call every night in such a small driveway. When the "emergency" ruse stopped working, the man began putting photocopies of outdated RIOC passes in his windshield.
Southtown now has 14 muni-parking spots, with two-hour limits, and will have a total of 28 when construction is completed on the remaining five buildings. That's fewer than half the spots available on one typical block in Astoria, and it's for the use of as many people as would fill up to 20 Astoria blocks.
On Roosevelt Island, parking is pure gold - which explains the fierce competition and the ire of the disenfranchised. Still, other communities with far more parking are less tolerant of infractions. On October 10, The New York Times reported that four of Jersey City's 10 municipal court judges, including the former chief judge, had stepped down while being investigated by the Attorney General's office for fixing parking tickets. Public Safety may not be fixing tickets, but the effect of erratic enforcement is to fix it so some people don't have to pay because they never get a ticket.
Parking on Roosevelt Island is regulated by the Department of Transportation, which distributes a pamphlet that clearly lists (and illustrates) 14 allowable permits. The list does not include some of the permits you'll find on Main Street, such as "Board of Education School Construction Authority" and "Off-Track Betting."
An SUV sans muni-meter ticket that stayed put during street-cleaning hours last week bore a placard reading: "Uniformed Fire Officers Association - This Vehicle is on Official UFOA Business" (not on official Fire Dept. business). Farance called the UFOA to check up on the legality of this, and a spokesman there said that the SUV's owner "lives there [Roosevelt Island]; his residence is there," and that the owner was not on any official business. Farance has previously noticed this SUV parked on Main Street on an almost daily basis, including different times of day and night, and for extended periods.
Farance may be the most visible of those who are fed up with parking favoritism, but he's not the only one keeping score. Island residents Geof Kerr, Ron Schuppert, and Mircea Nicolescu have conducted their own investigations, with similar results.
In 2004, The WIRE ran its own series of articles on the parking problems on Main Street, noting the paucity of options, cars that had been parked for months, lack of enforcement of regulations, etc. There are still rumors today of a master "Friends of" list. One Rivercross resident says that, on several occasions, she has observed a female Public Safety Officer calling Public Safety and giving a license-plate number before writing a ticket, perhaps to determine if the vehicle is on the "friends" list, which apparently supercedes DOT parking regulations.
In 2004, a referendum question asked: "Are you satisfied with the performance of Public Safety?" and 73 percent of respondents answered in the negative. Farance thinks their approval rating has gone down since then, and he's got the camera and the patience to make his case.